It’s the Trigger’s Broom Conundrum: is it still your favourite old broom if its handle and head have been replaced? How much can you change a thing before it’s no longer the thing it was originally was? The dozenth Doctor understands the principle all too well. He is the new broom. Different body, different head, … >
After last week’s instalment, in which Hugo Blick ramped up the sex and death to Doorsian levels, one might be forgiven for thinking the final episode was more a coda than anything else: when the music’s over, turn out the lights. Yet while ‘The Paring Knife’ is less incendiary than its predecessor, it matches – … >
With an ensemble show, there is almost always the feeling that someone will be sidelined, either for a more central character or for the person playing the role being more high profile. Luckily, as we hit the halfway stage of BBC One’s In the Club, Kay Mellor’s wonderfully human writing and the skill of the … >
‘Have you been watching the TV?’ Sir Hugh Hayden-Hoyle (Stephen Rea) asks with mock good cheer as the penultimate part of The Honourable Woman builds to a crescendo. ‘It’s really very exciting.’ Not half. The last six weeks have been enthralling, plotted tighter than an Edwardian corset and as tense as a gazelle at a … >
It’s always interesting to see how an ensemble show like In the Club will balance storylines for such a large cast and what priority the characters, and indeed the actors playing them, will have as the stories develop. Luckily, Episode 2 does a fine, and in some cases surprising job, of serving the whole cast, … >
If recent weeks have taught us anything, Humanity’s big fear isn’t terrorism or nuclear war. It’s getting sick. Ebola is the latest spectre. Before that it was SARS, Swine Flu, Avian Flu. We’re terrified of our demise being delivered by a sneeze. We fear sickness, because we fear a lack of control. We like to … >
Maybe it’s joke fatigue – the audience’s funnybones worn down by a lathe of relentless puns – but it tends to be the case with A Touch of Cloth that the second half feels a little less punchy and fresh than the first. It happened in Series 1, it happened more so in Series 2 … >
The Honourable Woman is hardly a light-hearted comedy romp at the best of times, but the sixth episode – which opens with a rape and ends with a young boy shooting himself – is bleaker than a Dartmoor funeral. Like a spindle of black cotton unravelling, ‘The Mother Line’ is dark from the first and … >
Kay Mellor (Playing the Field, Fat Friends) returned to our screens this week with In the Club, BBC One’s new comedy drama about a group of pregnant women from various walks of life whose lives intersect at a Parent Craft class the women attend. Whilst juggling their pregnancies, the women’s outside lives provide even more … >
Well if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and no one’s taken the tool-kit to A Touch of Cloth. Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier’s police procedural parody once more turns your television into a Naked Gun of puns and fires relentlessly at your face until you bleed laughter or your sense of humour is shot … >